


Stalemate

by SegaBarrett



Category: Chess - Rice/Ulvaeus/Andersson
Genre: Backstory, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:07:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28386726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Svetlana falls for Anatoly.
Relationships: Anatoly Sergievsky/Svetlana Sergievsky
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4
Collections: fandomtrees





	Stalemate

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ifimightchime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ifimightchime/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Chess and I make no money from this.

When Svetlana was growing up, she used to sleep to the sound of the wind whistling through snow covered hills.

Every memory she had seemed always filled with snow, with cold. 

When she moved to Moscow, it felt jarring, felt as if she had moved to an entirely different country rather than just from the small village to the big city.

But that was what her parents had wanted. Her mother had seen that living out life on the farm would be far too closed in, far more sheltered than she had hoped for her.

Far more... small.

When she met Anatoly for the first time, she had smiled at him and he had looked away. She wasn’t sure what had distracted him, then, but she was determined to get his attention.

She didn’t even entirely know why, just that it had to be.

***

The second time she saw Anatoly, she was in the market downtown and she was filling a basket full of fruit. It was one of those activities that really made her feel as if she was back in the village again, being a gatherer, outside all of the hustle and bustle that cut into the simple pleasures of life.

She loved to look at all of it, loved to run her fingers over the skin to try to predict which would be the best pieces. She loved to look at how it stacked up in her basket as if it was some kind of a still life.

But when she caught Anatoly out of the corner of her eye, she began to be sure that she might love looking at him even a little bit more.

She stepped forward, trying to gain speed before she lost her nerve. She wasn’t sure she would be able to find the words.

And then she moved up right behind him, almost close enough to touch, almost close enough to pretend that she had been walking beside him all along.

She reached out in a moment of impulse – they would never believe this back home on the farm, certainly, but they wouldn’t be scandalized quite but would chuckle and slap their knees and go “little Sveta being that forward? Certainly not!” – and tapped him on the shoulder.

He turned his head, looking a little bit dazed.

“Hello,” Svetlana said. 

The man blinked.

“Hello,” he repeated, standing in place.

“So, what are you buying?” she said quickly, trying to keep him locked into place so she could keep looking at him. She felt silly, sillier than she should have, and more reckless than she should have too.

But there she was, and she didn’t want to let the opportunity go to waste. Not now.

“Just some cabbages,” he replied, then hesitated. “I think I saw you once before.”

“You did?”

“I think I did.”

“I’m Sveta,” she said, kicking herself for leading so informally. He would have to think that she was completely out of her mind. 

“Anatoly,” he replied, then chuckled. “Tolya.”

“Tolya,” Svetlana replied, turning her face away so that he couldn’t see the way that she was biting on her lip. She liked him, liked him instantly and she couldn’t really say why. “Are you here to buy fruit?”

“Yes,” he replied. “I’m actually traveling in the next few days, however, so I should not buy too much… It goes bad when I get back and then everyone in the apartments are furious with me.”

“Traveling?” she inquired. “Where to?”

“Leningrad,” he replied. “I have a chess tournament.”

“Oh,” she said. “You play chess?”

He nodded.

“I do.”

***

She began to see Anatoly everywhere, and she began to make sure of it. 

Once she learned where his little apartment was, she would find reasons to walk by and wave at him, and then to pretend that it had been pure coincidence. If he caught on, he was too polite to say.  
Tolya was always very polite.

Once day he asked her to come to his apartment for dinner, to sit and eat and learn about each other.

She noticed that in the corner, there was a chess board, and he was midway through a game. The game seemed to be against himself.

Svetlana told herself that she would simply need to learn how to play chess.

***

It wasn’t long at all before they were engaged. It was important to move quickly when the days weren’t guaranteed. The people around her liked to joke that any day you were courting death every day from one thing or another.

“The paperwork alone,” they used to joke, and when she would sit at the little shop she had begun to work in, her co-workers would tell elaborate jokes and the Soviet bureaucracy was always the punchline.

So, better to start the process of marriage sooner rather than later. She would run her fingers over Anatoly’s shoulders when he was nearby, and run her fingers over the shiny little ring on her finger when he was not. 

It felt like she was always so close to him all the time, and that was all that really mattered. Proximity.

***

When they finally married, the days at first were long and quiet.

She would sit on the bed and twirl the ring on her finger while he sat in the corner and played chess for hours. Soon, tiny voices would break into his concentration, but not yet – not now. Only the sound of the Moscow streets, and it seemed that he had long since tuned them out, while she lived for them as a distraction.

Sometimes she watched him play. Most of the time she just looked away, off into the light. The shadows of his fingers moving around the chess board and his head, bowed and intent. The little sparks of sunlight that reflected off of him, the immoveable object. 

He would stop, eventually, and come back to bed. And somehow, she knew that that was always what she would be waiting for. For him to win or lose against himself at last.

Until then, they would be locked in a stalemate.

But she still hoped to win.


End file.
